Gruvi.tv: Personalized Film Recommendations for Facebook

There are lots of ways for film fans to try to determine which movies they want to see. They can read reviews in the local paper, check film forums or look up aggregate scores on RottenTomatoes or Metacritic for a view of what others might think about a certain film. But there are few ways to figure out which movie is right for a particular viewer. A new Facebook app launching in the U.K., called Gruvi.tv, hopes to change that, with a personalized recommendation system for movies currently in theaters.

When you go to Gruvi.tv’s Facebook app, it will recommend films to you based on likes and interests you’ve submitted, as well as those of your friends. By doing so, it can provide a more personalized view of which movies users might prefer, which might not match what’s popular or what’s currently out in theaters. As users interact with the app — for instance, by rating films — it automatically updates their recommendations to match that new data. That gives everyone a different personalized landing page whenever they come to the app.

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But Gruv.tv is more than just a recommendations engine. On the front end, Gruvi.tv provides Facebook users a personalized way to determine which movie might be best suited for them, but on the back end, it’s designed to give movie marketers tools to help capture audiences and get them into theaters. Gruvi.tv’s platform and gives them the ability to offer user showtimes, show users which of their friends liked a certain film, as well as add ticketing, quizzes and promotions to the page.

Gruvi.tv also sees an opportunity in helping studios to target new films to moviegoers after a campaign is over. Typically, once a film is launched in theaters, the studio loses its relationship with moviegoers on the Facebook page as they stop visiting, but Gruvi.tv believes it can provide tools to transition fans of one film to view another that may be in theaters or coming soon. And finally, the company can provide detailed analytics about user engagement around the fans who check out movies using its system.

Studios increasingly recognize the importance of social networks for promoting their movies before they are made available in theaters, and are spending big to reach audiences on Facebook. Gruvi.tv estimates that studio spend on Facebook marketing has gone from zero to €300 million ($428.6 million USD) over the last 18 months, and the average marketing budget per film has risen by about 50 percent over the past year. Gruv.tv hopes to tap into those dollars by being the funnel between its recommendation engine and film fan pages.

Since being launched in beta in Denmark, Gruvi.tv has worked with studios such as Warner Bros., (s TWX) 20th Century Fox (s NWS) and Sony Pictures (s SNE) to boost viewership with its tools. The app is now stepping into the U.K. with a campaign for the launch of Sony’s Bad Teacher in that market.

Some really interesting stats regarding the amount of money being spent by the motion picture industry on Facebook advertising. When juxtaposed with Rotten Tomatoes this seems like a natural evolution in providing casual movies-goers and movie-junkies with a handy app that they can access easily from anywhere to help make decisions on what to watch.

The wealth of information available on the social web is obviously the key to this apps success. That is to say that an app like this requires the ability to analyze both the demographic data available on the social web in addition to analyzing the sentiment behind the steady flow of tweets, Facebook updates, blogs, and forum posts.

As a rabid movie fan I’m really intrigued by this app and hope it does well!!

Nice article. Let me add my five cents (disclosure, I am an advisor to Gruvi): While it is really cool that the app builds on the power of social media to recommend and engage users, the truly revolutionary thing about it is that it can provide real metrics and analytics on movie fan behavior, which enables it to document ROI within facebook in much more effective ways than previously employed by advertising agencies to justify the high cost of their campaigns.
Applications like Gruvi are actually empowering film distributors to such an extent that they will disrupt the one last bastion of inflated film budgets: marketing. Proving that technology has indeed been the last nail on the coffin of the movie business as we know it. And this is not a bad thing as more effective and optimized marketing campaigns should be greatly influential in returning the industry to the golden profitable days of yesteryear.